The Booksellers (2019 documentary)

 

I became aware of this when YouTube trailers popped up early in the year. I can't remember whether I first saw them before the lockdown, or just as it was starting. Either way, I was intrigued. I love bookstores. I love New York. I love Bookhounds of London. This was an obvious buy - but was it worth it?

Oh yes. Definitely yes.

Directed by D.W. Young, whose documentary credits stretch back twenty years, this could almost be called New York Booksellers since its framing device is the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, most of its faces are New Yorkers, and its big documentary subjects (the Strand, the Argosy) are all New York icons. Even Rebecca Romney, who you may recall from Las Vegas' Pawn Stars, has relocated to the East Coast. You'd think there were no booksellers west of the Alleghenies. Possibly there aren't. I've never travelled west of the Alleghenies myself, so I can't comment. Been to New York at least thirty or forty times, and lived there for four months back in 1999, so ... 

If you're a Director looking for inspiration for your Bookhounds campaign, this is exactly the kind of thing you want to watch. If you're a player looking for inspiration for your next Hound, this is also exactly the kind of thing you want to watch. It's punchy, well-paced - I mean, look at the subject material, this could have been as dry as a bone - filled with brilliant characters and never beats you to death with information or statistics, the two bugbears of a documentary feature. 

There's one moment that, for me, encapsulates the Bookseller's appeal. An expert (Adam Weinberger) has been told a noted scholar has died, the spouse of an academic, and her collection has to be sold off. He knows she might have some treasures, so he has a look inside "the detritus of their lives." "My ears pick up," says Weinberger. "I think there's potential ... you always take a peek." 

My thoughts first are for those shelves and what might be on them, but then they wander to the apartment itself, which is a wreck. It's a New York wreck so it costs more than I could afford, but ... my God. I can only imagine that broken ruin in winter, with Jack Frost getting out the garden shears to nip off your toes and other extremities. Weinberger goes so far as to put on a mask (remember, this is all pre-COVID), which is probably wise. The person who lived there cared about books and nothing else. Absolutely nothing else. 

That scene in and of itself is an entire Bookhounds adventure, and it takes maybe five minutes of an hour thirty total. It almost writes itself. The Hounds have to catalogue a collector's entire library but a Cold One's lurking outside their wrecked apartment. It becomes a race against time; do they keep the Cold One out long enough for them to scoop up some unconsidered trifles?

If you're looking for a reason to watch this and aren't convinced yet (you monster!) let me put it this way: it's a remarkable, watchable glimpse into a book world that only exists right this minute. Twenty years ago it was completely different. Twenty years from now it will be completely different. The book business is one of the few that seems to thrive on change, despite the jeremiads from the old-timers convinced that nothing new is ever good.

A short while back I talked to YSDC about Bookhounds, and said I wished the game paid more attention to the book business. It sometimes feels as if the bookstore is just a framing device for the usual Scooby Doo action. Booksellers is here to remind you that buying and selling books is its own unique thrill, with all the joys and terrors of the carnival to entertain you. 

After all, it's retail. Anything can happen in retail. 

Enjoy!

Grimoires - The Long Lost Friend (RPG materials)

I've talked about grimoires before, those worm-eaten magical texts so often found on the bookshelves of the preternaturally deceased. In the last couple stories posted on patreon, Martin's Beach cunning man and private enquiry agent Mowry refers to one particular grimoire: the Long Lost Friend. I thought I'd take a moment to talk about that book.

Der Freund in der Noth; oder, Gehime Sympathetische Wissenchaft is known to have been published in 1793. No doubt its contents were liberally lifted from other occult works, but at this far remove it's difficult to tell where from. Like many other occult texts it claimed to draw on older secret knowledge.

The following secret remedies were taken from an old Spanish manuscript, which was found at an old hermit's who for over a hundred years lived in a cave in the dark valleys of the Graubünden Land, performing the region many wonderous works, among others totally expelling from the said region the monstrous dragon with four young which dwelt upon those fearsome mountains in Unterwalden.

So it's Spanish, which means it's from them there Foreign Parts with a very slight hint of South American/Aztec Wisdom. It comes from a mysterious place, and through its power great mystic works were possible. All good advertising needs your basic dragon or dragon-equivalent; nobody'd believe Tide got your whites the whitest without a demonstration.

What you actually got for your money was twenty-four pages of charms, medicinal remedies, and other magical workings. Since it was German it travelled across the ocean blue to America in the trunks and bags of German immigrants, and before long became in translation the Long Lost Friend. A collection of MYSTERIOUS & INVALUABLE ARTS AND REMEDIES for MAN AS WELL AS ANIMALS. First printed in English in 1846 by Pennsylvania German bookmaker Hohman, copies of this extremely rare edition now sell for thousands of dollars.

Of course this wasn't the only edition. Success breeds imitators, and before long there were several other Pennsylvania booksellers with their own versions of the Friend. One of the more ubiquitous is John George Holman's Pow-Wows, which went through many pulp printings in the early 20th century. There were some changes in content with each new edition, but at its core the Friend remained the book of charms it had been since 1793. Do you want to cure scurvy and sore throat? The Friend has a charm for that. Do you want to find water? The Friend will show you how.

Its influence lasted well into the 20th century. In 1951 a Pennsylvania Mennonite couple were reported to the police for refusing to have their serious ill child treated by 'scientific' medicine. Their belief in faith healing came primarily from Hohman's Long Lost Friend. "If the Lord wants to heal the boy, He will heal him," said the father to State troopers.

In 1928 a Pennsylvania murder was linked to the Friend. Farmer Nelson D. Rehmeyer was found beaten to death at his home, and it transpired that his killers had followed the advice of a pow wow man named John Blymyer. This cunning man had identified Rehmeyer as a witch whose hexes had bedeviled his killers. Rehmeyer happened to own a copy of the Long Lost Friend, and Blymyer knew about it. Blymyer told Rehmeyer's neighbors to break into Rehmeyer's house, steal his Friend and a lock of his hair, burn the book and bury the hair. That would break the curses they labored under. It all went spectacularly wrong, and in an attempt to cover up the killing the murderers tried to burn the corpse. They fled the scene without checking to make sure their cover-up worked. The fire went out, the murder scene was preserved intact, and the killers were brought to justice. Blymyer served twenty-five years in prison. After this, Pennsylvania authorities became extremely sensitive to hex magic cases, and the Friend got a reputation as a witch book.

In game terms, books like the Long Lost Friend confer no real power as such - not when compared to the eldritch authority of the Cthulhu Mythos. However they do have occult status. Any self-respecting curse-breaker is bound to have a copy. Moreover as it has been through so many printings by so many different booksellers, a Keeper would be well within her rights to give it a few Mythos touches. No doubt those touches are borrowed from some other text, just as the original Friend borrows its ideas from mysterious Spanish mystics.

CoC 7th Ed:

The Long Lost Friend. English translation of a German hex book, containing a collection of prayers, charms and medical advice. SAN Loss: 1/1D2. Occult: +4%. Mythos variant: SAN: 1/1D4+1. CMI: +2%. CMF: +4%. MR: 12

GUMSHOE:

The Long Lost Friend. Adds 2 to Occult rating. Potential dedicated investigative pool Oral History (assumes players use it or phrases from it in conversation with old folks, particularly in Pennsylvania or anywhere there's a significant German population) or Theology. The Mythos version provides 1 Mythos.

Whichever version you use, assume it confers no spells - or at least, no spells that work as advertised.

Enjoy!

Source material provided by Grimoires: A History of Magic Books by Owen Davies.

The Bookstore, Winter or Spring (Bookhounds of London)

It seems like a long time since I've touched on Bookhounds of London, so for a change of pace in the next few posts I'm going to design a mini campaign for Bookhounds. Of the three potential campaign types, Sordid, Arabesque or Technicolor, I'm going to go for Technicolor. It's not my favorite; I prefer Arabesque, but I see this as a challenge rather than an indulgence.

Technicolor is B-movie stuff, and when I touched on it in a previous post I used the Hammer Horror Satanic Rites of Dracula as an example. Hammer had a love-hate relationship with the British censor; its box office success depended on gore and sex, not necessarily in that order, and to get people's attention it had to push the censors just about as far as it could. If nothing else, public spats with the censor were good publicity, and its films always seemed to find an audience even when, as happened in the later 1960s, it started recycling sets, costumes, even scenes from film to film.

So a Technicolor style game probably ought to concentrate on the immediate viscera. There must be ichor, and in quantity. If ever you've wanted to play around with zombies or alien beings, now's the time to do so. Mummies roaming the Underground, Vampires haunting Westminster, ghouls lurking in the seven great cemeteries of London; these are all concepts that would suit a Technicolor game.

A Technicolor game is also exactly the place you'd expect to find spooky, cobweb-drenched mansions and forgotten crypts, so let's start talking about the Bookstore itself, since you'll be spending a lot of time in its shadowy confines.

The Bookstore is the scenario hub. The characters all devote themselves to its wellbeing. Without the money they earn each month, they'd be out on the street. But it may be more than that. The characters may be, or become, psychologically dependent on the place. Institutionalized, in the same way long term convicts become so used to their prisons that they can't bear to leave.

But how to design it? Let's take some inspiration from another game altogether: Ars Magica.

Ars Magica is one of my all-time passions, but it's been a long time since I had a chance to play. One of the things that attracted me to that system was its emphasis on troupe-style gaming, and its willingness to make the wizard's Covenant, the place where they all lived, a vibrant part of the setting. Too often a castle is just a castle, but the Covenant was always more than that. In all the games I played and many of the ones I ran, the Covenant was as much a character as any of the actual players' characters. That's exactly the kind of atmosphere I want in this Bookstore.

In Ars, the Covenant can be in Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter; that is, it can be just starting out, in the height of its powers, just beginning to show signs of age, and in near terminal decay. The decision to set the game in one particular season determines the tone of the campaign. But Ars isn't a horror game, so it can utilize the hope and confidence that comes with being at the height of your powers in Summer, or the preening arrogance of Autumn. Bookhounds is a horror game, and therefore doesn't suit either Summer or Autumn play types. I'm going to suggest that, in Bookhounds, the store is always either in Spring or Winter, never any other season.

What does this mean? Well, in Spring, you're just starting out. Like any new business, the store could collapse at any moment, for any number of reasons. 'The challenges are many, and the dull moments few,' says Ars about its Covenants. 'But if the trials and tests can be survived, the rewards are great.' This is a good style of game for new players to the system. It allows them to explore the setting and the rules without interference. It also means they have few resources. The shop's Credit Rating is probably low, and it has almost no important customers.

Whereas in Winter the Bookstore has seen out many decades, and may be on its last legs. It got its start long ago, possibly as early as the 1700s. If its walls could talk, they would scream, no doubt. This is the kind of place that has odd traditions, forgotten corners, and very dangerous secrets. It's probably on its way out, and may not survive to see 1940. But if it does go, it will be in a blaze of malignant glory. This is the kind of game for experienced players who know Bookhounds, and are happy to play with some of its concepts.

Now we come to the nuts and bolts. What ought this Bookstore be like?

Well, what does any store have? It has stock. It has an entrance, and probably more than one exit. It has furnishings and fittings. It has staff. It may or may not have a delivery van of some kind.  As this is a Bookstore it probably has a lending library. It may have a sideline that is not its main business but which earns a little money, like selling greeting cards, stamps, or other ephemera.

Perhaps most importantly it has character, a concept that's difficult to define but easy to spot. It's the difference between a Barnes and Noble, in which one store is always much like another, or a corner book barn, which is unique unto itself.

A Spring Bookstore doesn't have much of anything. There probably aren't any staff, except for the player characters. It won't have much stock, and its furnishings and fittings are second hand at best. I'm going to say that a Spring Bookstore has, at most, three things about it that are unique and interesting details worthy of description. Also, it probably doesn't have anything really weird about it. Weirdness is the kind of thing that grows over time, not unlike dry rot, and the whole point of a Spring game is that the store hasn't been open long.  Whereas a Winter Bookstore will have five things, since it's been around for decades if not a century or so. It will have many things that are odd about it. Probably also dry rot, but that's another topic altogether.

Ideally you'd get the players to cooperate here and think of a few of these details for themselves. In this example, I'm going to do all that groundwork. I'm also going to posit a Winter Bookstore, since that sounds more interesting to me.

This store has been around for many decades. Let's assume it was founded in 1803, by a French exile, Etienne du Bourg. He fled France during the Revolution, and spent some time in London working for Bonham's before branching out on his own. When he started his bookstore he returned to France several times, secretly, and brought back his own extensive collection of incunabula, which became the stock of his store. Though the store is now run by his thoroughly English heirs, it still retains the old name, du Bourg's. This is all borrowed (a little) from Madame Tussaud's, but what the heck. It works.

The building is classic Georgian architecture with all the Palladian neo-classic frippery that implies. This doesn't mean the business has a lot of money behind it. Its Credit Rating might be low, representing years of mismanagement and bad debts. The structure may look impressive, but be a leaky, damp pit in summer and a freezer in winter. Rats in the basement, mice in the closets, bats in the attic. All the joys of imminent financial disaster, wrapped in a cloak of genteel refinement.

So, about those five things:

History: M Etienne du Bourg, the founder of the business, took a leaf out of Jeremy Bentham's book and had himself mummified after his death in 1833. Unlike Bentham, du Bourg didn't mind so much about the cadaverous appearance of his mummified head, so his corpse - currently enshrined in his alchemical laboratory in the basement of the building - still has all its original parts. By tradition, the owners of the business meet once a year in the laboratory, on du Bourg's birthday. At that time the financial returns of the previous year are read out, and presented to the assembly for approval. The assembled drink to the health of the business and its founder, and the meeting concludes. By tradition the staff and invited guests can attend, but in recent years only the business' owner(s) have gone to the meeting. People do say that M du Bourg wanders his laboratory at night conducting experiments, but nobody's ever proved this one way or the other.

Stock: When M du Bourg recovered his library from Europe he brought with him his extensive collection of the works of Francois Honore-Balfour, Comte d'Erlette, including many rare pamphlets, autographed correspondence, and, of course, Cultes des Ghoules. According to the shop's records du Bourg had three copies of that book, including one described as 'in Cordwain binding,' which it has been alleged is a coded reference to one of the three bound in human skin by Honore-Balfour himself. Over the years many of these items have sold to collectors, while others have gone missing. Only one of the Cultes is supposed to have been sold, at auction in 1870, but nobody knows where the other two are. Legend has it that du Bourg hid the rest of his collection before his death, and successive generations have done their best to find it in hope of rescuing the business with a big sale.

Monster: Ever since its opening du Bourg's has always had a cat, and by tradition this has been a ginger tom, always with the name Maher-shalal-hashbaz. Cat after cat has made mincemeat out of the generations of rats and mice that infest du Bourg's. Recently people have noticed that the latest Mash is just a little more feisty and enthusiastic than its illustrious forbears. In fact it's a Mythos entity, or controlled by a Mythos entity, Keeper's choice as to which. Perhaps its friendly with some ghouls who live nearby and feed it sweetmeats when they visit to have a nosey through the library, or perhaps its a minion of Bast with powers of its own. It has no particular allegiance to the staff or shop, but it's not going to destroy its home on a whim. As to what Mash actually is, well, spoilt for choice really. Perhaps he's king of the cats or some shapechanged thing out of Ken Hite's Writes About Stuff series. Power level relatively low, no more that Health 8 and say 3 to 6 Magic.

Shop: Though the building is large, in recent years the management has stopped using some of the upper floor rooms because of damp problems. At least, that's the excuse management have offered for why several upper floor rooms are permanently locked. But locked they are, and it's more than anyone's job is worth to open them again. Odd noises are heard up there at times, and at night people have reported seeing lights in those deserted rooms. Perhaps it's the secret meeting place of some kind of cult, or perhaps it's haunted. Perhaps it once was the meeting place of a cult, and that's why it's haunted. The only way to know for sure is to go and see.

Staff: Most of the staff are probably player characters, but du Bourg's has been around for a long time. Long enough to accumulate some very curious hangers-on; ancient, crumbling wrecks who dodder from room to room like something out of Titus Groan. Perhaps they know a little Idiosyncratic Magic, or perhaps they just drink all the tea and eat all the biscuits. However Mister Bourg, as he is known, is by far the most senior, and the keeper of all the shop's traditions. Though he may not be the Bourg that actually owns the shop - that role ought to be reserved for a player - he certainly behaves as though he is, and he knows everything there is to know about the place. In the first few sessions he ought to be a fount of knowledge, if not the voice of the Keeper, but as time goes on and the players start showing signs of independence, he'll probably become a minor villain of sorts. If the players decide to sack him, the shops Credit Rating immediately drops by 1, and they'll have earned an enemy for life. Such as it is; someone as aged as Mister Bourg surely can't live that much longer? 

That's enough to be getting on with. By now you should have a clear idea of what du Bourg's is like, how it operates, and the kind of stories it can generate. Note that I've deliberately not mentioned its location. It could be anywhere in London. That's for the Keeper and players to decide for themselves. I've also not gone too deeply into subjects like the bookshop stock or its Credit Rating. Again, that's something best decided by Keeper and players together.

Enjoy!

The Rental Library (Bookhounds of London)

A while ago now I had cause to mention George Orwell's essay on running a book store. Among the topics covered was the store's rental library, something that was very common in Orwell's day but is extinct in ours. I wondered how it was organized, what its purpose was, how it was run. Wonder no more, for there is a book out there that reveals all: Ruth Brown Park's Book Stores and How To Run Them.

I had no idea this book existed until someone Tweeted about it, probably because the cover is so evocatively art deco. First published in 1929, copies of this can be had relatively cheap, and while it's not an absolute must-buy - the writing's a little dry, and as might be expected it dwells on the economics and accounting side of the business - any Keeper interested in running Bookhounds might at least see if it's available on inter-library loan. Naturally I turned to the Rental Library chapter first.

Few new book shop owners realize the importance of the rental library, it begins. Besides furnishing a source of steady income, remember always, a rental library brings people into your store. At first they come only to rent, but passing attractive displays on their way to the Rental Department, they eventually begin to buy,. And therein lies your opportunity. Make permanent buyers of former borrowers. Let people learn how delightful it is to own books, not merely to rent them. Create in them, through subtle sales talks, a desire to become book collectors, not transitory owners. You can do this if you exert real selling technique ...

Already I'm beginning to see why the Rental Department is extinct. The core assumption, judging by this piece, seems to be that people don't really know that they can buy books; that ownership is within their grasp. There's almost a subtle class war situation going on here, where a host of potential buyers, who previously thought that owning books was for the well-off, now realize how wonderful it could be to have a real, live book of their very own, to cuddle and play with and call George. In 1929, this might have been true. These days the written word doesn't have quite that same upper class cachet. People who want to own books just go out and buy them, and the ones who don't want to own books wouldn't care if Rental Departments opened up in all the Starbucks across the land.

George Orwell, since we're in his territory again, discusses this tendency at length in the essay Books vs Cigarettes. A couple of years ago a friend of mine, a newspaper editor, was firewatching with some factory workers, Orwell begins. They fell to talking about his newspaper, which most of them read and approved of, but when he asked them what they thought of the literary section, the answer he got was: "You don't think we read that stuff, do you? Why, half the time you're talking about books that cost twelve and sixpence! Chaps like us couldn't spend twelve and sixpence on a book." These, he said, were men who thought nothing of spending several pounds on a day trip to Blackpool. For the record, one pound in old currency is twenty shillings, and each shilling is twelve pence. Twelve and sixpence is twelve and a half shillings, or slightly over half a pound.

Orwell's essay concludes that, overall, reading is probably the cheapest recreation available, but it might not have appeared that way to the people doing the spending, because reading seems expensive when compared to everyday luxuries like cigarettes or beer. The individual pint or pack of coffin nails is relatively cheap compared to the price of an individual book, but when a year's spending is taken into consideration, you're likely to have bought, and spent more money on in aggregate, many more cigarettes or pints than you have books. Yet each cigarette or pint can only be consumed once, while a book lasts as long as need be.

Of course, says Park about the Rental Library, no definite choice of books for the renting department can be laid down, because the character of your patrons pays such an all-important part. However it has been found a good plan to have, first, the latest and most popular new fiction; second, the popular books of the past year, and the earlier books of authors whose present books are causing discussion; and third, non-fiction having wide popular appeal. 

The point always being to draw people in. Footfall is the life blood of retail. Remember what was said previously, about passing attractive displays on the way to the Rental Department. This is exactly the same kind of technique used in retail outlets all over the world; large chains, like Walmart,  have this down to a fine art. You put the things that you know the customers will want as far away as possible, so the customer has to walk past other things on the way to their destination. Those who walk past may stop, at those attractive displays, and those who stop might buy. I've previously spoken about shopping malls, and the practice of keeping key tenants far away from each other, so people have to walk from one to the other. The principle's the same. Only the scale is different.

As far as revenue's concerned - remember that source of steady income mentioned in the first paragraph - the retailer gets his cash up front. There's a deposit, refundable when the member decides he's had enough and wants to withdraw, and a small charge per week. Local competition would probably affect your decision as to deposits and rentals, Park diplomatically concludes. Some shops might choose not to demand a deposit, for fear of frightening off patrons. Orwell points out that theft is common in rental libraries, with the books being sold on at a small profit to other book shop libraries, but also says that the shop owner felt it was an acceptable loss, so long as Rentals kept drawing people into the store. 

Park starts talking about accounting at this point, and I shan't bore you with that, but she goes on to mention something I hadn't considered. Book wrappers should be of some distinctive design, with the name of your shop in clear relief. The more original and outstanding they can be, the more chance you have of saying to the public, "We have a rental department, and we can serve you."

You'd never persuade a shop owner now to produce their own line of dust jackets. The cost would frighten them half to death, but Park's writing about a time when paper's cheap and people's expectations are different. They'd demand dust jackets for their leather-bound darlings; only the pulps went about in horrid softcover.

From a Keeper's perspective, this is possibly the easiest prop ever invented. Want instant atmosphere? Photoshop a half-dozen dust jackets, wrap them around the books in your collection, and you're sorted. Or if you haven't got anything suitable, go to a second hand shop and buy a few of their cheapest old hardbacks. Let the players argue over the shop's logo, or how best to advertise. Oddly enough, this is exactly the sort of minutiae that many players love to get involved in, not unlike the Innsmouth House Players' inordinate fondness for period menus and food. You may even have to spend an entire session arguing over how best to design the jackets, but to be honest, if your players are quite that mad, good luck to you!

So there you have it: the Rental Department, in all its glory. What will it be to your bookshop? A constant trial and expense, with chancers nicking the books every other week? A source of revenue and advertising? What happens if a corpse turns up in an alleyway with one of your shop's books in his pocket? That attractive wrapper with the shop's name, address and logo on it might not seem like such a wonderful notion ...

That's all for now. Enjoy!

Forgotten Lore (Bookhounds of London)

In the wake of Ken Hite's recent KWAS, Goetia, I'd like to talk about grimoires. What are they, and what can a Keeper do with them?

A grimoire can best be described as a magic text, filled with occult secrets, intended to instruct the reader. Often the instruction contains information on how to cast a spell, to summon forth demons, angels or other spirits, and how to attain supernatural power. Supernatural power is a wide-ranging term, but it doesn't mean the ability to chuck fireballs about; it means the ability to find things, or do things, that the user otherwise cannot find or do. Often this means finding treasure, coercing someone to fall in love with you, or some other relatively mundane feat which the user desires, but cannot achieve himself. This is usually tailored to the customer's specific desires; for example, many military men, even in the Enlightenment, believed they could increase their martial skill through diabolic means, or attributed a rival's ability to the machinations of the Devil.

There are several things to bear in mind when considering grimoires, but the chief fact is this: people prefer to believe that the best kind of magic is exotic magic, from some foreign source. The West looks to the East for its magical inspiration, while the East looks to the West. This is one of the reasons why Hoodoo magic, for example, often draws on European sources for its mystic authority. The publisher William Delaurence, also known as De Laurence, of Chicago, cribbed much of his knowledge from authors like Levi and Waite, turning their work into his mail-order Book of Moses. Meanwhile Levi and Waite were getting their information from sources like the Kabbalah, and Levi happily prattles about an eternal knowledge that can be found 'the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practised at reception by all secret societies ...' 

Mystic isn't what you find next door. Mystic is what you find in far-off lands, where there are foreigners and strange, spicy foods. It's even better if your source is both foreign and old; age gives even the most crackbrained of philosophies a dignified patina.

Another thing to bear in mind is that grimoires are often banned, or at any rate frowned upon by the powers that be. Delaurence's work, for example, is still outlawed in Jamaica, even today. Sometimes this can lead to less-than-amusing instances of mistaken identity. Dungeons and Dragons, in the 1980s, was frequently condemned by hard right-wing and conservative Christian movements, and people like Patricia Pulling and Jack Chick tried to convince us all that the game's Satanic underpinnings led to suicide, and worse. 

The third thing to bear in mind is that you don't really need any kind of qualification, or experience, to write a grimoire. Anybody can do it, and with mass publishing, many hundreds of thousands have done it, often under assumed identities, occasionally under their own name. Delaurence knew that putting his own name on a book guaranteed a sale, such was the power of his reputation, but frequently the imagery used to promote his books is pseudo-Hindu, evocative of the mysterious East. Even today, it's not at all difficult to find many hundreds of small presses churning out occult text after text, most of them almost certainly rehashing the grimoires of old, much as Delaurence himself did.

What does this mean for Bookhounds of London?

To begin with, it means that, if the protagonists' shop becomes known for selling grimoires and odd incunabula, they are probably going to run foul of the law. Someone will make a complaint, probably some busybody who glanced in the window and saw something they didn't like. The police, even if they don't really believe in magic, are going to be very interested in the kind of shady customers who do, and who probably frequent the shop. The police may even begin to suspect that the characters are involved with pornography, or worse. As for the local church, while the Anglicans have always been a bit live-and-let-live, there's bound to be a firebrand out there somewhere willing to camp out on the characters' doorstep and accuse them of corrupting minds, or working in Satan's army.

It also means that there will be dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of self-published or small press authors, besieging the bookshop monthly. You sell this stuff, they say, so why not sell, or even publish, mine? Here, I have the authentic mysteries straight from the trackless jungles of Tibet, or the scorching deserts of India, the mysterious pyramids of Timbuctoo ... and so on. Some of them will actually know what they are talking about, but most won't. Lack of knowledge has never stopped an author yet.

Meanwhile the customers will be after texts that service their peculiar needs. It might be true love, promotion at work, hidden treasure - most likely along the lines of 'where did granny put the will' rather than heaps of gold, but treasure nonetheless - success at cards, success on the stage, or any one of the thousands of other desires that people come up with. If your shop is frequented by theatrical types, they will want a specific kind of grimoire. Bored housewives will want something else, and so on.   

Ah, but what about the true mysteries? After all, the Goetia KWAS isn't about fakers and cheesecloth ectoplasm; it presumes spirits can be summoned up.

To begin with, it's reasonable to assume that, most of the time, the Bookhounds will be selling on these texts, rather than using them. All kinds of ideas can flow from this. For example, what about the dissatisfied customer, the one who bought your forged grimoire, tried it, and found that it didn't work? That could result in something fairly mundane, like a Reversal in the shop's fortunes, as the bad press gets around. It could also have unforseen results, as with the customer who thought he was summoning up one demon, but in fact found himself summoning up something else altogether, thanks to a misprint or your Hounds' careless forger. In that event, the entity summoned up might want to return to the store, either to have a little bit of fun with the people responsible for its release, or because it needs something - the bits of its book that the Hounds didn't use in the forgery, for example.

It's also possible that the customer who successfully summons demons might want to use them against the Hounds, for whatever reason. Imagine the lovelorn suitor, passionately pursuing, say, the book scout, or owner of the shop. That customer might send a demon in to seal the deal. Or someone wanting more books might send demons to the shop as a persuader, either to get the Hounds to find the books for her, or to get the Hounds to lower their price. Or the collector who's trying to get hold of all published editions of a particular imprint, sending the Hounds to demon-haunted places in pursuit of his prize.

But suppose for a moment that the Hounds decide to summon some demons of their own? There might be many reasons for doing so, but one of the most likely is financial, to keep the shop going, or to engineer a Windfall.

Well, demons are notoriously unreliable fellows. They might stick around, haunting the book stacks. Or the same ritual that summoned them might have let lesser spirits in as well, things which could make life very tricky for the Hounds. When asked to exterminate these pests, the original demon might reply that it's not in the Pact for it to play rat-catcher, or it might acquiesce, for a fee, of course.

The chief thing to bear in mind is, whatever this spirit, fallen angel, or Cthulhoid remnant is, it has a personality, and it has goals. The summoner might see it as a tool, or a servant, but nothing could be further from the truth. A demon is an intelligent entity, and it knows what it's getting into when it responds to a summons. It's done this many thousands of times before, after all. Some demons are warlike, gnashing their teeth and stamping the ground, relying on intimidation and fear. Others are whining, flattering little toadies, promising everything, delivering very little. There may be smooth politicians, envious belchers of hate, careless gluttons, glamorous seducers, and thousands of other types among the demonic ranks.

If you rely on them, beware, for they are not and never will be your friend and ally.

God forbade it, indeed; but Faustus hath done it: for the vain pleasure of four-and-twenty years hath Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity. I writ them a bill with mine own blood: the date is expired; this is the time, and he will fetch me.

Read more at: http://www.risenotes.com/faustus/Dr-Faustus-best-quotes.php?pn=4
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 God forbade it indeed, but Faustus has done it. For the vain pleasure of four-and-twenty years has Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity. I writ them a bill in my own blood; the date is expired, this is the time, and he will fetch me ...

God forbade it, indeed; but Faustus hath done it: for the vain pleasure of four-and-twenty years hath Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity. I writ them a bill with mine own blood: the date is expired; this is the time, and he will fetch me.

Read more at: http://www.risenotes.com/faustus/Dr-Faustus-best-quotes.php?pn=4
Copyright © RiseNotes.com

God forbade it, indeed; but Faustus hath done it: for the vain pleasure of four-and-twenty years hath Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity. I writ them a bill with mine own blood: the date is expired; this is the time, and he will fetch me.

Read more at: http://www.risenotes.com/faustus/Dr-Faustus-best-quotes.php?pn=4
Copyright © RiseNotes.com

Bookhounds of London: Found in the Margins

There's an interesting piece in the New York Times that I encourage you to read, about marginalia and its increasing value in the book trade. Three major universities have received significant funding to study marginalia created by certain people, the magician John Dee being one.Until recently marginalia was looked on as a sin in the book world, but these days it can be worth big money.

If you've ever owned a second hand textbook, then you already know what marginalia is. Whether or not the scribbling and doodles interspersed with the text is worth anything will depend on the identity of the scribbler. The Times quotes a Christies auction in which a chemistry text annotated by Michael Faraday sold for $38,000 when the high estimate was $25,000, and points out that an ordinary, pristine copy of the same text would sell for only a fraction of that amount.

Before now, it was common practice to destroy marginalia when it was found. Booksellers thought it made the text less valuable, calling marked books 'dirty,' and libraries routinely destroy this ephemera when it is discovered. There's an organization, Book Traces, devoted to tracking down and preserving these items and notes, wherever possible.

From a Bookhounds point of view, removing marginalia - if the characters want to do that - uses the Forgery ability. It's not just about erasing text; it's about making it seem as though the text was never there, a tricky thing to pull off. The Keeper might call for something like this if the Hounds pick up a text that needs tipping in to make it complete, and increase its value.

On the other hand, there are plenty of times when marginalia might add value, or become significant to the plot. Poems annotated by Randolph Carter, or an anatomy text with Herbert West's scribbles, are only ever going to interest Mythos scholars, but those can be the most determined collectors. Don't forget that many of these characters traveled extensively in their lifetime, which means that they could have left marginalia in all kinds of interesting places. Imagine, say, an official history of the Regiment with odd photographs, scraps of paper drawings and maybe a medal or two attached, or used as bookmarks. Say it was West's old unit in Flanders, and that West was one of those who contributed a photo or two, perhaps one of those drawings. Now imagine it being further annotated by West's old C.O. Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, the headless medico.

That kind of thing is bound to be plot significant rather than valuable in its own right. Though someone with Mythos knowledge might be interested in the contents, to anyone else it's just a battered old book. But there are plenty of characters in Lovecraft's fiction whose marginalia might be valuable in its own right. Occultists and scholars like Von Juntz, Ludwig Prinn, the Comte d'Erlette, and so on, are all going to be of interest to people who have little or no understanding of the Mythos, and those scholars will have left behind letters, notes, drawings, and other items, stuffed in the leaves of the books in their libraries. Picture a medieval Arabic text on astronomy, annotated by Von Juntz, or a love letter by the Comte d'Erlette used as a bookmark in a history of Paris. Those things may not have any plot significance, but there are going to be people out there who will go nuts over them.

Finally there is the double whammy, a Mythos text with marginalia. Something like the King in Yellow with annotations by Hildred Castaigne, or Leggett's 1821 Mysteries of the Worm with notes by Halpin Chalmers. The books themselves already add Mythos, perhaps potential Magic, even granting dedicated pool points. The King in Yellow, for example, adds 2 to Cthulhu Mythos and 1 to Art, permanently. One annotated by Castaigne might do all that, and also provide 1 potential Magic point, or, in a Dreamhounds game, refresh Instability.

That's it for now! This may be the last entry before the New Year, so let me take this opportunity to wish you every good thing in 2015!

Lovejoy and the Mythos: Bookhounds of London

If you've never read Jonathan Gash's Lovejoy series, I recommend them to Bookhounds Keepers in particular. The TV series is fun too, but it has a broad comedy streak, and comedy rarely ages well. Still, it's worth looking at for the atmosphere alone, and since many of the episodes involve auctions of one form or another, it's handy for setting the scene if you have an auction coming up in your game and aren't sure what to do about it.

I want to talk a little about divvies, but for that to happen I need to describe Lovejoy to the uninitiated.

Lovejoy is the main character in the series. He's an antique dealer and forger with an unusual talent: he can spot the real thing. In the series it's described as a near-supernatural gift; he can just feel when an antique is right, a talent he calls his 'bell' which rings the minute he comes into contact with the real thing. It makes him especially desirable to a certain kind of collector, and also a certain kind of criminal. Often it means he's swept up in one scheme or another, desperately trying to keep one step ahead of the people trying to manipulate him.

The very first book, The Judas Pair, is a case in point; Lovejoy is hired to find a near-mythical set of flintlock dueling pistols, only to discover that murder follows in their wake, and not just because the pistols themselves are desirable. In that story Lovejoy is hired by the brother of a former owner, who apparently was shot with one of the dueling pistols, though neither weapon can be found. How did Eric Field die? Who has the pistols now? What are they prepared to do to keep them?

This is actually one of the better ones for Keepers to pick up. Since it is the first, Gash is heavy on the detail, and there's plenty here about the shadowy world of antique collecting and forging. However we're not here to talk about books: we're here to talk about forgery.

In the game, the Technical ability is described as follows: 'you can create a false document, forge handwriting with a sample to work from, or (given time) fake an entire book. This ability does not convey any special skill at creating aged paper or ink, or at bookbinding, or an ability to write or otherwise create a given volume.' Which is good so far as it goes, but the poor forger is then lumbered with half-a-dozen Art and Craft specialties that he absolutely has to have in order to do his job, and will never actually use in game unless the Keeper's feeling kind and manufactures a clue to suit his peculiar build. Given that ability pool points are at a premium during character creation, I tend to say that a forger needs Art and Craft, but doesn't need to sink points into all those different specialties.

However this merely means that the character can create a forgery, and I suspect in most games this ends up meaning that the players decide to make a small fortune by forging, say, the Cthaat Aquidingen half-a-dozen times, palming each hooky copy off on some unsuspecting occultist. How often does it happen that someone tries to pass a forgery off on the player characters?

The Document Analysis ability allows players to tell fakes from genuine, but there is no in-game equivalent for any other kind of Analysis. It could be easy enough to rationalize different kinds of Analysis, all of which are Technical abilities that do broadly the same thing as Document Analysis but which work in other mediums: Art Analysis, Weapons Analysis (for those antique arms and armor), Furniture Analysis, Collectables Analysis (for any small tchotchke that doesn't fit in the other categories), and so on. Naturally the characters aren't going to be interested in these Abilities, not unless toy collecting - or what-have-you - is also part of their store's remit. These would be NPC abilities, for those moments when your character has to phone a friend to properly identify and value the item in question.

Of course, this does tend to create the impression in the players' minds that Analysis (of whatever type) always works; you spend a point, you get the benefit. That isn't precisely so. I would count these kinds of Analysis in the same way the game counts Lockpicking: an ability that always reveals a clue when there is a clue to be had, but which can also be used as a General ability. General abilities can fail.

Which is where Lovejoy comes in. As a divvy he has a special talent, his Bell, which in game can best be represented by Idiosyncratic Magic, used to bump up a General roll that didn't quite hit the Difficulty target. Exactly how this would work is up to your enterprising Bookhounds, but I'm sure they can think of some peculiar ritual that helps them tell false from real.

In the Bookhounds universe, there's bound to be a few divvies out there with actual magical powers. There's also bound to be even more people who pretend to be divvies in order to get customers, or who actually believe they have powers when in fact they do not. The psychic field is full of deluded practitioners who honestly believe everything they say, but just because someone swears a thing is so does not make it so.

It's up to the Keeper whether he wants one of the player characters to be a divvie. There's no real harm in it, and it can help the forger out. I find that forgers in my games are a bit like netrunners used to be in Cyberpunk; the idea's great, but the actuality doesn't really work the way you think it would. Forgers often end up locked in the back room, talking to no-one, diligently creating fakes. They lack a reason to get involved with the outside world, but certifying true antiques from forgeries gives them a reason to get out and meet people, and having a reputation as a divvie means the outside world will eagerly come to them.

But what is a fake, exactly? It's something that pretends to be real, and have value. That 'have value' is the most important part of the equation; nobody bothers to forge things that are easily available on the open market, for little or no money. From a Bookhounds point of view, it's a potential disaster waiting to happen.

Consider: every shop, no matter what it sells, operates ultimately on the basis of goodwill. So long as people think the store is reputable and does good business, customers will keep walking in the door. Many businesses, particularly in the service industry, are bought and sold on the basis of goodwill alone, not its physical assets. Any restaurant can buy tables and chairs, but they can't buy customers, and if there's a food poisoning incident that hits the papers, you can bet that restaurant's goodwill just dropped through the floor. It's the same with a bookstore. Who wants to be known as the bungler that certified a fake as the real thing? What store wants a reputation for passing off hooky merchandise? That's why a reputable dealer, if he becomes aware of a fake in his collection, has to eat the cost rather than try to pass it on to an unsuspecting customer. The consequences of being found out are just too great.

From a game perspective, being found to have sold forgeries, knowingly or not, must count as a Reverse. That means someone needs to be checking incoming stock, to make sure none of them are too good to be true. I'd suggest a Difficulty 4 check once every so often, perhaps at the beginning of the session, though not at the beginning of every session. However I would suggest that successfully selling a valuable forgery does not count as a Windfall, except for shops with Credit Rating 1 or lower. One sale, more or less, does not make a business; but being caught selling fakes, even once, can ruin it.

That's it for the moment! I hope you found this useful.

Trail of Cthulhu: Bookhounds of London: Ned Kelly's Skull

This post is inspired by a recent article concerning the fate of Australian bandit and folk hero Edward 'Ned' Kelly. I'm not going to recount Kelly's biography here - that's what Wikipedia's for - but, in brief, Kelly, after several minor brushes with the law, escalated to murdering policemen sent to arrest him, and started robbing banks. Their most memorable, and final, encounter was at the small town of Glenrowan, near Victoria, where Kelly and his friends, dressed in bullet-repelling armor, captured the entire town, thinking that police were due to arrive by train and that, if the gang acted quickly, they could derail that train. The pursuers were warned by a constable named Curnow before they reached the ambush point, and surrounded the gang at Mrs Jones' hotel, where Kelly and his men lay in wait along with most of the captured townsfolk. The resultant siege was bloody and violent, eventually ending when the hotel burnt down, but Kelly was taken hours before that. He'd been shot several times in the lower body, including once in the groin, but his armor protected his upper body and head. Kelly was hanged on November 11th, 1880.

Though the authorities tried to deny it, Kelly's body was taken for dissection, and his skull allegedly was given to phrenologists to examine, before being returned to the police who used it as a paperweight. The bodies of Kelly and his associates were exhumed in 1929 when building works took place at the gaol, and a skull alleged to be Kelly's was retrieved. However it's since been shown that the 1929 skull did not, in fact, belong to Kelly, which means it must have gone missing some time before. Nowadays there are several people who claim to have it, including a self-proclaimed witch. It might have been carried off by phrenologists, or it might have been buried somewhere else. Interestingly, the skull that was recovered in 1929 - and stolen in the 1970s, only to be returned in 2009 - probably belongs to Frederick Bailey Deeming, once thought to be a likely Jack the Ripper candidate.

From a Bookhounds perspective, there are at least three contemporary books that might turn up in London:

Sadlier, John, Recollections of a Victorian Police Officer, (1913)
Kenneally, J. J. The Inner History of the Kelly Gang, (1929)
Hare, Francis Augustus, The Last of the Bushrangers: An account of the capture of the Kelly Gang (1894)

In addition to these books there would have been scores of Kelly artifacts, from photographs to bits of armor and guns. Many of these - like the revolver belonging to one of Kelly's early targets, constable Fitzpatrick, which sold for $70,000 at auction in 2007 - are probably fakes.

With all that in mind, consider the following Trail (Tale) of Terror:

A bottom-feeding Book Scout, David / Dolores Veles, is working on behalf of an as yet unknown client, and is making a nuisance of himself. Veles is after Kelly memorabilia of any sort, but is particularly interested in three books, each of them ex libris Francis Brevor, an occultist and self-proclaimed Satanist who committed suicide in 1930. According to Veles, Brevor had copies of Sadlier, Kenneally and Hare's works, as well as a mysterious 'fourth item' which Veles is very reluctant to describe, but for which Veles is prepared to pay an astronomical sum. The fourth item, kept in a special oak box, is Ned Kelly's skull, which Brevor supposedly took from a phrenologist enemy in 1896. Nobody knows where the fourth item is, though Veles suspects that annotations in the three books from Brevor's library might hold the key.

1. Veles is working on behalf of a particularly ghoulish client, who wants to grind Kelly's skull to powder and ingest it, in a potion of his own concoction. He thinks he will consume Kelly's essence that way, gaining special powers as a result. However the skull, it transpires, isn't Kelly's at all, and the client will be most upset at this deception. The client won't believe Veles when he protests he knows nothing about the fraud, and he probably won't believe the protagonists either.

2. The skull was brought out to London by a phrenologist who believed he was actually stealing Deeming's remains. He intended to use the skull as part of a ritual to evoke Jack the Ripper, which spirit he intended to use as part of a long-running scheme to reopen the Eye of Byatis (see further Whitechapel Black Letter, in the main book). When he discovered the skull was actually Kelly's he was most upset, and sold it to Brevor, an expatriate Australian for whom it had sentimental value. The problem is, the phrenologist's botched Byatis ritual has inadvertently linked Kelly's ghost to the Eye, causing the skull to be a kind of focal point, leeching London's malignant spirit and causing whoever might be its current owner no end of trouble. Veles' client has heard of this Byatis artifact and thinks it can help him in his own studies, but nothing could be further from the truth, as Kelly's twisted ghost will be only too happy to demonstrate. 

3. Veles is actually working for Brevor, who's been dead for years. Except not really; Brevor faked his death to escape immolation at the hands of a particularly powerful rival. Now Brevor thinks he has a chance to revenge himself against his enemy and lure him into a trap. But first, the bait: Kelly's skull, which Brevor claimed, untruthfully, had special powers. With Veles out there spreading rumors and buying up Kelly artifacts, Brevor thinks it's only a matter of time before his rival shows up in person, eager to get that skull. Then the fun will begin! Of course, some innocent Bookhounds might get caught in the crossfire, but who cares about them?

Antiquarian Associations: Bookhounds of London

I was going to talk about Night's Black Agents again - and will, soon enough - but Ken Hite posted an article that intrigued me. It's the Center & Clarke Newsletter from UCLA, and on the 9th page it starts talking about Ye Sette of Odd Volumes. I don't propose to talk about that here - though I do recommend you read the newsletter - but about something else that cropped up as I was reading it.

At one point the article talks about Bertram Rota, Booksellers. I wondered if it still exists, and Google tells me it does, though it no longer has a London storefront and does most of its business online. However on perusing its site I noticed that it claimed among its plaudits that Anthony Rota, presumably the current owner, is a past president of the ABA. So what is the ABA, I asked myself?

Once again, Google has the answer. The Antiquarian Booksellers Association is a trade body, founded in 1906, for dealers in antiquarian and rare books. "Members are elected solely on the basis of proven experience, expertise and integrity," says the ABA. "They are expected to observe the highest professional and ethical standards and to foster the mutual trust and respect that exists between the trade and the public." It currently boasts something in the region of 250 members in the UK and abroad, all experts in their trade. It doesn't have any specific bookbinding contacts, and admits it is hesitant to recommend any particular binder, "as we don't have any control over their quality, or any real knowledge of their product." Nor does it really want to recommend an auctioneer or auction house, as those are its competition. As far as the ABA's concerned, it's all about the books and nothing but.

Which means it maintains a database of lost or stolen books, and while naturally it lacks any significant information about what was going on in the 1930s, it's safe to assume the ABA was doing much the same then as it does now. That may intrigue certain player characters; if nothing else, it's a good way of checking the provenance of certain rare volumes, and can help avoid trouble. Or foment it, if the character was the one doing the stealing. It also keeps a library, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary; a .pdf of its contents can be found here. That does suggest it wouldn't have been around during the typical Bookhounds campaign, but it's likely the ABA had the beginnings of a library before the current one was founded. Its collection of links is also worth a look, if you want to learn more about the book trade. It isn't the only booksellers trade association - it isn't even the only one with the acronym ABA - but from a Bookhounds point of view, it's the only one that matters.

What does this suggest? From a fictional standpoint, of course; I accept that, from here on out, whatever is said may not reflect the actual practices of the ABA.

Well to begin with, membership of the ABA must be rather like getting into the Michelin Guide. It's all very well having a store front and shelves of books, but how does the discerning customer track you down? While it's not operating on a one to three star system - une des meilleures tables, vaut le voyage - the ABA badge is a sign a quality, one that customers trust. With that discreetly displayed in your official literature your fortune is, if not assured, at least much more likely than it otherwise would be. From a game mechanic point of view, the ABA is unlikely to be interested in any shop with less than 3 Credit Rating, and even most of the 3-point places are probably on the outside looking in.

It also suggests that someone must vet these establishments, and their proprietors. Again taking a leaf out of the pages of Michelin, the vetting process is probably anonymous. You don't know who might be judging you, or your expertise; these silent observers flit from shop to shop, evaluating its quality and the expertise of its staff and owners.

Finally - and this is purely from a Trail perspective - it also suggests the possibility of an organization within the ABA, devoted to occult studies. After all, in this universe magic is real, certain books have a power all their own, and strange, terrible things are known to have happened to those who unwarily ventured into bookselling's murkier corners. The ABA would be well aware of this. Whether or not the ABA has acknowledged occultists and cultists within its ranks, or just a few rather well-informed experts, is probably going to depend on whether your game is Pulp or Purist. In Pulp almost anything goes, but in Purist there's only going to be one or two people 'in the know' when it comes to the uncanny. "It's not the sort of thing we talk about," an ABA member might say, "but if you really want an expert opinion on that text, you should show it to Smythe. It's his bailiwick."

So after all that, an example ABA expert:

Edward Smythe

Physical: Short, thin, in his early 40s. Dark wire-brush hair, always slightly unkempt; he's forever trying to brush it into submission, and it never takes. Hands like a concert pianist, which he takes obsessive care over.


Arabesque: Smythe is an intelligent overachiever from a poor family, whose scholarships and academic prowess pushed him into the realm of books. He occasionally dreams of a large castle with hundreds of rooms, all of which he has access to save one. He knows the door of that one room as well as the door to his own home, and sometimes he wonders what might happen if he saw it in the waking world. His eyes are wide, and filled with dreams; at times, say his friends and contemporaries, he sees things which aren't there.

Technicolor: Smythe is a ghost-hunter. It's not something he likes to broadcast, as it would hurt his reputation, but he's worked with Harry Price and other famous psychic researchers. He's put down three hauntings so far, in addition to all the usual frauds and 'ghost sightings' that turn out to be faulty water pipes and the creaking of old houses. It's whispered that, in addition to the ABA, Smythe is also a member in good standing of a secret occult society, but it's not the kind of thing a chap like Smythe would ever talk about.

Sordid: Smythe, while not a forger himself, is on good terms with many who are. It helps him in his work and, its said, he has been known to let pass a questionable tome or two, at the right price. He doesn't do it often, for fear of being caught, and in Smythe's case 'the right price' isn't coin of the realm. But as for what it is, you'd have to talk to Smythe to find out, and let him touch you. Those hands of his seem to have a mind of their own, sometimes.

Tainted:  A man can't do as Smythe has done and not come into contact with the Dust Things. Smythe is hag-ridden each night, and in order to survive has come to certain accommodations with his mistress. Pockets full of dust, he goes out into London, spreading he knows not what; it's the only way to stay sane.

Three Things: A very slight Liverpudlian accent, which he does his best to cover over with rich, BBC-quality tones. He has a morbid fear of cats, and can't bear to be in the same room with one. He always carries a cane; the Arabesque version uses it as a kind of divining rod, while in Technicolor it's probably a sword cane.

Credit Rating: 4

General Abilities: Athletics 4, Auction 8, Fleeing 5, Health 6, [Magic 6, if Keeper chooses], Scuffling 3, Weapons 5

Areas of Expertise: Art (Engraving), Art (Printing), Craft (Papermaking), Languages, Occult.

Alertness: +0

Stealth: -1

Bookhounds of London: The House Sale

A man died to bring you this blog post. His name was Ralph.

I never really knew him, though I probably met him at some point, as he was a friend of the family. He had a very nice old house with water views, the sort of well-built 1930s design that stands up very well to the test of time, unlike many modern builds. Like most of us, he filled his house with stuff, things that his family neither wanted or needed but had to get rid of, if they were to sell the place or live in it themselves. The word went out: house sale! Time to get some bargains!

Living on an island, you get very used to the concept of trawling round leaving sales and the like, looking for a good deal. If you buy new, you're paying the importer's premium - often a very high mark-up - for the kind of cheap(ish) tat that, you know in your heart, you could pick up for half the price in any larger, more well-stocked market. A house sale, particularly one like Ralph's, is a good way of buying quality stuff at knock-down rates. On the other hand, from the seller's point of view, you just want rid of all that junk as quickly as possible, and what a load of tat it often is! Dog-eared cookery books and old algebra texts used by young Ralph, aged 15, still gathering dust all these decades later. Sofas and chairs, rotten with age, that wanted new covers and restuffing ten years ago and now need putting out of their misery. Chipped novelty jugs from a long-forgotten vacation, bedside tables, prints probably worth more for the frame than the content, and pretty much every other tchatchke you can imagine, plus more besides.

For those thinking this sort of thing is unique to my situation, I can assure you it isn't, and I have proof from an expert authority: J.R.R. Tolkein. Mild Hobbit spoilers ahoy!

And so they crossed the bridge and passed the mill by the river and came right back to Bilbo's own door.

"Bless me! What's going on?" he cried. There was a great commotion, and people of all sorts, respectable and unrespectable, were thick round the door, and many were going in and out - not even wiping their feet, as Bilbo noticed with annoyance.

If he was surprised, they were more surprised still. He had arrived back in the middle of an auction! There was a large notice in black and red hung on the gate, stating that on June the Twenty-second Messrs. Grubb, Grubb and Burrowes would sell by auction the effects of the late Bilbo Baggins Esquire, of Bag-End, Underhill, Hobbiton. Sale to commence at ten o'clock sharp. It was now nearly lunchtime, and most of the things had already been sold, for various prices from next to nothing to old songs (as is not unusual at auctions). Bilbo's cousins the Sackville-Bagginses were, in fact, busy measuring his rooms to see if their own furniture would fit. In short, Bilbo was 'Presumed Dead,' and not everybody that said so was sorry to find the presumption wrong.

Which just goes to show that Tolkein must have been to one or two auctions in his time. The pattern remains broadly the same today. As with any sale, those who get there first get the good stuff, and many of those present aren't there to buy at all, but to poke their noses round the place and gather - or spread - good gossip. Prices are uniformly low, even for the so-called valuable items, because the priority is to get the stuff out the door and the higher the price, the more likely it is it will go unsold. Particularly in a family sale you will often find the family on site, more or less melancholy, depending on the situation. It's worth bearing in mind, as many of you may know from personal experience, that these situations seldom bring out the best in people. The potential for reawakening old quarrels is very high, and it is not uncommon to find cousins squabbling in the parlor or spouses in tears because they've been denied the whatever-it-may-have-been that their hearts had been set on. And that's just the family; the bargain hunters can easily spark off their own to-do, over some forgettable bit of rubbish that they wouldn't look twice at if it wasn't on sale.

From a Bookhounds of London perspective, this situation is a potential gold mine for the Keeper. Some points you might want to bear in mind:

First, remember that the objective, from the seller's perspective, is to clear the house. That means everything, from curtains to carpets, has a price tag. The protagonists may only be interested in books, but that doesn't mean everyone else there is. Depending on the scale of the sale, there may be scores of people crowding round, or just a few neighbors and family members. This is a time for Interpersonal Abilities to shine. Gathering information can be as important as getting hold of that valuable first edition, particularly if the protagonists want to know where all the really good stuff is, or went.

Second, the protagonists will need to dig if they really want to find anything. The seller certainly won't have done anything more than some very basic organizing. A lot of items may have been left exactly where they were found, particularly the furniture and heavy stuff. Other, smaller pieces will have been taken out and put on display, so the kitchen counter - for example - is bound to be covered with pots, knives, china, and everything else that, until the sale, rested quietly in a kitchen drawer. Bulk items, like the books, may have been gathered up into boxes and will be sold by box. Or perhaps not; they might still be on a shelf somewhere. If you want to find something interesting, you need to search the whole house.

The protagonists should be aware that what they buy may not be all they take away. We found, quite by accident. Ralph's wallet in a drawer of a side table we took away, complete with credit cards. One of the books I picked up has all sorts of old newspaper clippings and other ephemera tucked between its leaves. Look at your own house, or apartment, and imagine what's hidden in some bag, or box, or drawer. Anything could turn up anywhere, and while most of it is undoubtedly not worth the trouble of collection - sorry to say it, but it's true, and no less true of my stuff than it is of yours - every so often a gem will surface. The people running the auction will go through the collection looking for that sort of thing but, particularly in a large sale, they can't be expected to find it all.

The protagonists should remember that not everything has to be in their specialty in order to be valuable to them. Back in 2012 I wrote about Orwell's Bookshop, and it's worth referring to again now. Remember what he said about his lending library:  

Probably our library subscribers were a fair cross-section of London's reading public. It is therefore worth noting that of all the authors in our library the one who ‘went out’ the best was — Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell's novels, of course, are read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that men don't read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel — the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel — seems to exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific.         

Bear in mind, the protagonists are in business to make money. They might live for the day they finally discover the grimoire of their dreams, sell it, and retire to some blissful Pacific atoll on the proceeds; but in the meantime, they need to pay bills, and that means supplying what the customers want. Moreover I don't doubt for a minute that the buying public's consumption patterns have remained unchanged since Orwell's day. The Ethel M. Dells of this world still make a pretty good living, and while the critics may adore a literary phenomenon, that doesn't mean the phenomenon's books fly off the shelves. Finding a collection of some romance author's works can be a good way of keeping the shop afloat, and a useful reward for a protagonist determined to put the effort in to find it.

But what kind of property has a house sale? Broadly speaking, it's a middle class occupation, but that's a very all-inclusive term. A governess who spent all her life looking after other people's children, and who retired to a little cottage or flat, is as much middle class as the stockbroker who earned a very good living in the City and who owned a country house, even though each would have understood the subtle differences in their own social station. The smaller sales won't attract as much attention as the larger ones, of course, but that doesn't mean they're not worth paying any attention to. After all, governesses spend a lot of time in other people's houses, and often pick up things given them by their more well-to-do employers.

Not every house sale is, by definition, an auction, as not every decedent is a Bilbo. There are very many businesses that make their living out of going through a place and carting away the rubbish. Enterprising Bookhounds ought to be on very good terms with people in that line of work, but it's also worth their time poking through the items that don't get collected. You hear, every so often, about the incredibly valuable painting or other antique found in the skip after the house clearers have been. That could as easily be your players, if they're sharp about it.

Is this limited to Bookhounds of London? Not necessarily, though for obvious reasons it's most applicable to them. There's scope for Night's Black Agents, for example, in a house sale, but protagonists in that sort of game are probably going to be involved in more high-end auctions. There's limited interest in a James Bond type poking his nose in some granny's bloomer drawer, seeking bargains. Yet clearances aren't limited to grannies and the like; government archives are often throwing away valuable stuff, sometimes by accident. Or perhaps it's kept well beyond its sell-by. It's well known in London, for example, to those interested in such things, that lurking underground in forgotten tube stations and bomb shelters, there are still old records dating back to the war. The government had all kinds of blitz-proof hiding places and offices scattered over the city, and when the war ended, often the shelters and storage facilities were locked up and forgotten about. Imagine an old Nazi bunker in Berlin, not touched since the war, suddenly rediscovered during building works. Or imagine the sudden interest there might be in, say, hard drives from Russian computers, sold on by enterprising bandits or ex-internal security people, if people realized what kind of data was stored on them. That sort of thing can happen in many different circumstances; there's been interest, recently, in Silicon Knights' sale of office supplies and computers to Precursor Games, and Silicon had to prove that the hard drives were wiped before sale, as part of its dispute resolution with Epic Games. Tech companies go under all the time, and only those with the appropriate Abilities will be able to work out where all their - potentially valuable - stuff went. Or say an old Cold Warrior with unusual connections cashes in his chips unexpectedly. There's bound to be an interest in his belongings, and the only question is, can the protagonists beat all the other interested parties to the punch? 

This is intended as food for thought for the Keeper. There's plenty of mileage to be had from a house sale, whether as a one-off event or as the kicker for a more in-depth series of scenarios. Just bear in mind, someone's treasure is another person's trifle ... unless it turns out, as happened with Ralph's wallet, that trifles hide treasures after all. 

 

The Value of Knowledge

I've talked about books within the context of a Trail of Cthulhu campaign once or twice before, arguing for the concept of fake Mythos, and describing a potential Mythos tome. This time I want to talk about books that aren't Mythos related at all, yet still have their uses in a horror setting.

There are many possible Mythos tomes out there. The main Trail book mentions seventeen, but even a little research will uncover dozens more, many of them invented by scenario writers specifically for a particular campaign or one-shot. This is undoubtedly useful, yet - particularly in the early stages of a campaign - I'd warn against resorting immediately to Mythos tomes.

When I discussed the first story arc I mentioned that it should be almost entirely about the setting, and the characters' role in that setting. If it is Arabesque, then everything the protagonists encounter should reinforce Arabesque tropes and ideas, and so on. Naturally this means that, in general terms, the kind of horror the protagonists will be coming up against is low-key. Something to whet the appetite, not something capable of crushing the life out of the protagonists.

What this means in terms of Mythos tomes is that, realistically speaking, there probably oughtn't to be any; at least, not in the first arc. At most, perhaps there are rumors, or one or two fakes floating around; but anything that dangerous probably oughtn't to be on offer, at least not until the very end of the arc.But if there are no Mythos tomes, then what kind of tomes are there? After all, the protagonists run a bookshop; they can hardly be expected to ignore books.

My response is that there are books, and plenty of them; ordinary, honest books, like the Thousand and One Nights (I'm having a lot of fun with that in my own campaign), which don't in themselves have Mythos knowledge, but can be used as part of an ongoing plot. In some cases borrowing from the plot can be useful; imagine a book scout, sniffing for valuables, who happens to re-enact the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor in the process. Or perhaps a regular customer to the shop, who begins to take on attributes common to Ali Baba, complete with meddling rich brother and a hidden treasure. In that setting, the books could become a kind of divining tool, not unlike the way the bible is used in M.R. James' The Ash Tree. What is troubling our dear friend, and why is that book mysteriously open to that very page in which Ali Baba discovers his dead brother, killed by the Forty Thieves?

But this kind of indirection may not suit every campaign. There are more direct methods. The Dust-Things described in the Bookhounds can be very useful, in that they take on attributes of the books they mimic. Imagine what a collection of, say, R.L. Stevenson's works might become, with one or two of those hidden away in its leaves. Would the bookstore become the haunt of pirates? Or would the Dust Things lead the protagonists on to discover the New Arabian Nights, and the Suicide Club that still exists, hidden somewhere in London?

There is one other alternative, and that is to have a mundane book become magical. There are plenty of precedents for this; black magicians often wrote their copies of the Grand Grimoire out in longhand, on the presumption that their personal energies, poured into the creation of the book, made the item magical. There's potential for almost anything to become an occult text, under the right circumstances.

And with that, let me tell you about the Books of Knowledge.

Printed by the Grolier Society in London, this Children's Encyclopedia was intended to teach - and mould - young minds, and included such topics as nature, science, famous books, golden deeds, poetry, and - most important, this - Things to Make and Do. I happen to have a 1911 collection of these inherited from my great-grandfather, which is how I know about them; I used to read them when my grandmother looked after my brother and me. Physically, the collection is a set of sixteen thick hardback volumes, mostly black-and-white with the occasional color plate. The stories are intended to be edifying, though often in a gruesome sort of way; I'm looking at The Story of Little Red Shoes as I type this, which ends with headstrong Karen pleading with a headsman to cut off her perpetually dancing feet rather than her head; her eventual reward is to be taken up to Heaven by an angel. And all this, mark you, for the crime of wearing pretty red dancing shoes on a Sunday. One line in particular strikes me as being strong meat for young minds: She told the headsman what she had done, and persuaded him to cut off her feet, and away they danced in the red shoes across the moor. Now there's the stuff of nightmares! But I digress.

I want to talk about Model Town.

It is a very troublesome thing to build a real town, the opening paragraph reads, and it costs a great sum of money. There is the land to buy, streets to make, sewers to lay, architects, builders, clerks, foremen, and workmen to pay. Then inspectors and surveyors come to see that the work is being done as they like. So that not many people have ever built a whole town alone. We will try to do so ... 

It goes on to describe how you, with your inquiring young mind, sharp knife - but what boy or girl is without a knife? - pencil, glue, and a quantity of cardboard, can construct wonders. It starts with a model of Shakespeare's birthplace, but it doesn't stop there. There's the Fire Station, a Farm, the Chapel and its Parsonage, Shops, Villas, the Church, and, of course, the Gasworks.

It is some time since we made any new buildings to add to Modeltown, the last section reads. The last building we made was the Gasworks. We could go in indefinitely ... If we have made all the buildings, or even a considerable number of them, we ought to have become rather expert at the work of cardboard modelling. But, after all, we have only followed instructions and plans. There is, however, a much higher ability than this. There is the ability to think things out for ourselves, and invent ...

In game terms, the Books of Knowledge in themselves are non-magical; perhaps poring over them will net the reader 1 temporary pool point History, Art History, or similar. But there is one very special collection, previously owned by Henry Worthing, and poring over that will earn the reader 1 dedicated pool point Craft (model buildings), and 1 point Occult, Magic, or Megapolisomancy, reader's choice.


Henry Worthing, born 1901 in India, where his father was a colonial administrator, was a happy child, but wild in his habits. The Books, bought for him by his doting mother, were the only things to truly capture his imagination, and he spent hours and days working on his Model Town, which he patterned on what he imagined London to be like. Then he was sent Home shortly before the War started, to live with his aunt and uncle in the real London. He soon discovered that all was not as he had imagined; his relatives grudged him his keep, often told him that he was only there on sufferance, and was a wicked child, for any number of reasons. His parents' deaths soon afterward only compounded his sorrows; though there was a little money, his aunt and uncle kept most of it for themselves. Meanwhile Henry stayed up in the attic, working day and night on his Model Town. Now he had the actual London streets and buildings to work with and, piece by piece, he put together something extraordinary.

Then, one night, Henry vanished, never to be seen again. It was claimed at the time that his relatives, worried that their bilking of his inheritance was about to be uncovered, got rid of the boy, but a thorough investigation came to nothing. The Books - and Henry's Town - were soon got rid of, presumably destroyed.

Yet, claim some Megapolisomancers, Henry's London proved remarkably difficult to truly kill. Some of his models have turned up in the most unlikely of places, and are prized by those who use the bricks and soul of London in their magic. But the books are the real prize, and more than one practitioner has spent many hours picking through obscure bookstores, hoping against hope that they'll stumble across one of the precious volumes with Henry's hand-written notes in the margins.

As to where Henry himself ended up, practitioners of the Art theorize that Henry managed, one night, to vanish into a London of his own devising, becoming one with the city he loved so much. Perhaps his aunt and uncle could shed some light on what really happened, but his uncle is - supposedly - dead, and his aunt now lives far out in the countryside.

It's said she has a horror of cities.

Mythos Knowledge

I recently discussed flim flam artists and fakers in Trail of Cthulhu, and suggested that in any setting there ought to be at least some fakery. Without false knowledge, players will come to expect that everything in front of them is the exact truth, that if early indications are that vampires (say) are at the root of the scenario then they won't go looking for other explanations. I used the example of a psychic healer in that post, but today I want to talk about something slightly different: false knowledge, specifically false Mythos knowledge.

Now, before I go any further on this topic I need to make one thing clear. If the Keeper intends to use false Mythos knowledge in a campaign, I strongly advise that he discusses this with the players before the campaign begins. The Keeper must always be perceived as a fair arbiter, whether of rules or anything else to do with the game. Introducing house rules without telling anyone, only bringing it up when a player falls foul of the house rule, is the quickest way to ruin gaming friendships I can think of. Bear this in mind!

Cthulhu Mythos is defined in the main book as the secret rules of the real world, [not] the ignorant scrim of physics and religion. You recognize the great names, and the truths they conceal ... The primary use of this ability in the course of an investigation is to “put together the pieces” and draw upon the terrible knowledge that you have been subconsciously suppressing, achieving a horrific epiphany. Using it costs both Stability and Sanity, and the benefit provided is to point the characters in the right direction towards solving the scenario's mystery.

If there is such a thing as false Mythos knowledge, then based on this description two things are clear: first, it cannot - by definition - point the characters in the right direction. Fake is fake. They may accidentally stumble in the right direction regardless, but that's their good luck. Second, though it might cost Stability to use it, false Mythos ought not to cost Sanity, since - again, by definition - false truths do not reveal great names or any significant information, and it is that information which wears away at a person's Sanity.

Therefore false Mythos does this: it costs precisely the same, in terms of Stability and possibly also Sanity, as a real Mythos reveal of the same magnitude - as discussed on pages 74-6 of the main book - but it provides no actual insight. This may mean that the Keeper has to come up with a completely false lead for the players to follow, or that they are presented with a means of solving whatever problem faces them but that this method will not actually work when used. This can be especially devastating should the players be basing their entire last-ditch plan of attack on false knowledge. The results could be severe, possibly even death for one or more characters. The Keeper needs to factor this possibility in when including false knowledge; only if the Keeper is happy with the potential result - up to and including a total party kill - should the false knowledge be used.

There is an obvious flaw which you probably spotted straight away. If false Mythos costs no Sanity to use, then players will immediately spot it for what it is. Yes ... but there are two points to consider. First, that by the time this becomes apparent the false Mythos has been used and therefore has done all the damage it can do. Thus imposing a Sanity penalty on top of everything else could be seen as overkill. Second, that if the Keeper wants to maintain the mystery there are rules already in the game to help achieve this. The Denial rule (p 75) states that if, at the end of the adventure, there is absolutely no proof of your horrible experience – samples, photographs, recordings, eerie artifacts – then your Sanity rating recovers by 1 point. Effectively it "never happened," so the penalty is reduced. In the case of fake Mythos, it can't ever happen - it's fake, after all - and in that instance I would recommend that the Sanity rating recovers by the amount "lost," whatever it may have been, at the scenario's conclusion, rather than just by 1 point. It could be argued, particularly in a Purist setting, that 1 point is all the player is entitled to regain, but that seems harsh to me; again, if the Keeper intends to do that, I strongly urge that this be made clear at the outset.

Why use fake Mythos? Again, this goes back to the flim-flam argument, but I'd go one further and say this: particularly in a setting like Bookhounds of London, which depends so much for its impact on fraud, deception and vice, it seems counter-productive to suppose that every source of Mythos knowledge is telling the truth. Some of those dusty grimoires must be fakes, but how then to separate those - from a rules point of view - from the ones that aren't?

It's not as if there have never been frauds in real life. The Vinland Map, the Book of the Zohar, Jack the Ripper's Diary, to name just three forgeries created either with the deliberate intent to deceive for money's sake or as part of a more insidious attempt to spread false doctrine. Moreover there have been any number of occasions when a "new" work by a famous literary figure has suddenly been discovered; any number of artists who have lived off of their ability to copy a famous person's style. Given that, it is increasingly likely that someone - probably quite a few someones - have tried to grift their way to fame and fortune by copying, say, the artistic flourishes of a Pickman, creating a play in the style of The King in Yellow, or discovering a hitherto unknown von Juntz. These wouldn't necessarily have been modern fraudsters either; scarcity bumps up price, and as soon as the Cultes des Ghouls went on the bonfire in the 18th century there would have been someone trying to persuade one of the mystical societies - perhaps a Hell Fire Club - that they had access to one of the Comte d'Erlette's unpublished works, and was prepared to part with it for a small consideration. Frauds of this type would be all the more difficult for a modern researcher to identify as frauds, since they would have been created with materials appropriate to the period.

The biggest difficulty with using false Mythos is that it requires bookkeeping. Each and every source of Mythos would need to be identified and cataloged; you can't just add them straight into the pool with no record of where it came from, or you'll never be able to tell the good stuff from the bad. The player will need to record that the character has, say, a Cthulhu Mythos pool of 3 points, of which 1 comes from direct experience during a scenario (and is therefore true), 1 comes from studying a text (which may or may not be true), and 1 comes from miscellaneous occult researches (talking with ghouls in the churchyard, or otherwise learning from primary sources, which is therefore also true). Anything based on direct, personal experience - an encounter, consulting with Mythos entities and the like - is certain to be true. Nothing else should be as certain, so in those cases where a Mythos point has to be spent the player needs to specify where the point came from. That should make for some very tense decision-making moments, as pools start to deplete and the players begin to wonder: ought I really trust the information in that tome? After all, I got it from Bainbridge, and he's a born liar if ever there was one ... but he might not have been wrong about this.    

Naturally false Mythos should only be used at the Keeper's discretion, and with full knowledge of the probable outcome: defeat for the characters, and therefore the players. That doesn't have to be a bad thing; this is horror gaming after all, and players are bound to lose from time to time. However don't forget the advice I gave earlier; the Keeper should always be seen as a fair arbiter of events, not as someone who changes the rules to suit themselves mid-session. It should also be possible for the players to detect frauds before they do damage, and there are skills - Bibliography, Textual Analysis, Document Analysis - that can help careful players do exactly that.

Provided of course that they remember to use them; after all, even if the cult leader whose group they just defeated prized that tome above all others in his collection, his belief doesn't make the Mythos knowledge contained therein true ...